Mayurbhanj, Odisha —In a remote village nestled among the sal forests of eastern India, a young researcher’s experiment with artificial intelligence is giving an ancient tribal language a digital second life. What began as a doctoral pursuit has become a cultural reclamation effort, one that could redefine how India preserves its linguistic diversity.
A Village Scholar and His Unlikely Mission
Dr. Bikram Biruly, who once grazed cattle while scribbling the Ho script on a slate, returned home last month to a hero’s welcome. The 30-year-old from Matkam Sahi village in Odisha’s Mayurbhanj district had just completed his Ph.D.—and in doing so, achieved something unprecedented: he became the first person to train an AI model for the Ho language, spoken by roughly 1.4 million Adivasis across Odisha and Jharkhand.
Biruly’s academic journey, rooted in his doctoral research, was both technical and deeply personal. He built a dataset of about 20,000 sentences, converting them into the Warang Kshiti script, Ho’s native orthography. His model integrates Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to transcribe spoken Ho, Entity Recognition to classify names and places, and Part-of-Speech tagging to understand grammar — a full linguistic pipeline for a language previously considered “untrainable” by machines
“I wanted to prove that our words, too, could be read by computers,” Biruly said in an earlier interview. “If AI can learn English or Hindi, why not Ho?”
A Language at the Edge of Forgetting
The Ho language, one of India’s oldest indigenous tongues, has long faced the dual pressures of neglect and assimilation. Despite being spoken by a sizable community, it remains absent from the Eighth Schedule of India’s Constitution — the list of officially recognized languages that receive state support. Inclusion, Biruly notes, would grant Ho the same protection and institutional recognition as the 22 languages currently recognized.
For many in the Ho Adivasi community, Biruly’s work represents more than academic innovation; it symbolizes resistance against centuries of marginalization. “Language is survival,” said a tribal elder from Mayurbhanj. “If the tongue goes silent, so does the people’s memory.”
Yet cultural prejudice lingers. In parts of Odisha, the phrase “Ulloh ku jete sijheile sijhibo nahi, Kulho ku jete bujheile bujhibo nahi” — meaning “a Ho will never understand, no matter how much you try” — remains a slur. The idiom, likening the community to a “hard-to-boil vegetable,” captures the deep-seated stereotypes that have shadowed the tribe for generations.
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When Artificial Intelligence Meets Ancestral Knowledge
Biruly’s innovation challenges not just linguistic erasure, but the assumptions that Indigenous languages are incompatible with modern systems. Using machine learning, he trained his model to recognize Ho phonetics, syntax, and morphology—an intricate process that required encoding oral traditions into structured data.
The project’s implications extend beyond preservation. If successful, Biruly hopes to integrate his AI model into platforms like the government’s Adi Vaani app and Google Translate, potentially making Ho the first tribal language in India to be digitally accessible at scale.
“The goal,” he said, “is not only to digitize, but to dignify — to make our language visible in a space where it was once invisible.”
Toward Recognition and Revival
India’s linguistic landscape is both vast and fragile. Of the more than 19,500 mother tongues once recorded in the census, many have fewer than 10,000 speakers left. UNESCO classifies dozens as endangered. Experts warn that by the end of this century, nearly half of India’s minor languages could vanish without trace.
Biruly’s success story — from a boy in an unmarked village to a researcher in a cutting-edge linguistic lab — represents a reversal of that trend. His work offers a blueprint for how artificial intelligence, often seen as a force of homogenization, can instead serve as a tool for cultural resilience.
As he prepares to collaborate with India’s Ministry of Tribal Affairs, Biruly envisions a future where every child in Mayurbhanj can read and speak Ho on digital devices.
“AI may be modern,” Biruly adds, “but our language is timeless.”
